Tracking, calculating, watching: Governing and delay in the Jakarta Smart City

Abstract

AbstractJakarta is widely lauded by global consultancies, technology giants and critical scholars as an increasingly important ‘smart’ city. One of the reasons for this is the attempted use by state, corporate and individual actors of smart technologies, discourses and practices to solve the urban challenges of flooding, traffic and waste management in the context of climate change and urbanisation. In this paper, we examine the efforts of the Jakarta Smart City programme and office to govern these challenges. Where smart cities are often described as offering speed and real‐time efficiency, we instead find that the technologies and practices mobilised by the Jakarta Smart City programme govern by projecting, delaying and hypothesising into the future. We describe these governance strategies and outline three of their key forms: keeping track of objects and people, calculating and projecting state savings, and mundane watching but not acting. Rather than facilitating exacting and real‐time policy responses to address these urban problems, these practices instead produce temporal relations of delay that push action further into the future. Building on existing research about futuring and anticipation, and the tempos and rhythms of smart cities, our contribution is to highlight slowness and delay as a key mode of governing.